Former President Donald Trump did not do federal workers many favors. He instigated a partial government shutdown that left them furloughed for five weeks. He played political games with their annual raises. And he tried to weaken their unions and civil service protections .

President Joe Biden has already sent a very different message as the new boss of the federal workforce.

Biden signed an executive order last Friday repealing three controversial orders from the Trump administration that undermined federal job security and collective bargaining rights. On the same day, he revoked a separate action from Trump that would have converted certain career jobs in the federal government to political positions, so that more people could be hired and fired by political appointees.

On Wednesday, Biden also took a step toward addressing political interference in scientific research, a hallmark of Trumps tenure that affected federal workers in different agencies. Bidens plan creates a task force that will spend four months reviewing government policies and identifying cases of partisan meddling. Although the order does little substantively, several researchers applauded it as an important first step in safeguarding scientific integrity.

Overall, the quick actions by Biden signal a new era for federal workers who were buffeted throughout the Trump years. The previous administration tended to equate regular government workers with the so-called swamp, happily pushing them out of jobs and even using them as pawns in Trumps fight with Congress for border wall funding.

Trumps efforts to hobble federal labor unions, although they gained less attention than furloughs and shutdown threats, were just as significant.

One of his orders would have made it easier to fire federal workers, by gutting their grievance process and giving them less time to improve their performance. Another sought to renegotiate union contracts on a tighter timeline, in hopes of securing agreements on less favorable terms for workers. The third took aim at official time: hours that union representatives can devote to union-related issues while on government time.

The American Federation of Government Employees called these initiatives illegal union-busting. Union officials saw the trio of executive orders as an attempt to weaken government unions into oblivion, by restricting their powers so much that workers would see no point in being members anymore. (The federal government functions under a right to work system, in which workers are not obligated to pay fees to unions that represent them.)

Brian Deese, director of Bidens National Economic Council, told reporters Friday that the repeal of those executive orders would protect and empower federal employees who dedicate their careers to serving the American people, many in very difficult circumstances in this pandemic.

The quick reversal of the Trump orders signified a new relationship with the White House, said Tony Reardon, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 workers in 33 agencies. Reardon said Biden personally told him during the presidential campaign that he would withdraw the orders if he was elected.